OS X :: Firewire 800 External Drive Is Slower Than USB2.0?
Feb 5, 2010
I recently bought a VANTEC NexStar 3 NST-360FBSU-BK. In the exclosure, I have a SATA drive capable of 3.0Gb/second. It's attached to my Late 2009 Mac Mini via FireWire 800. Based upon my understanding and in this situation, the FireWire should be the bottleneck. Therefore, I should be enjoying bandwidth somewhere shy of 800Mb/second. nfortunately, I'm not getting any where near that speed. I can transfer a 726MB file in 18.6 seconds. According to my math, that's ~5808Mb/18.6 seconds = ~312 Mb/second. This is not even FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 speed.For completeness sake, I also just upgraded from 2GB of ram to 4GB (both PC8500) but nothing seems negatively affected (in fact the computer is much, much more snappy!).
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Jun 5, 2009
I have the 2007 intel mini and I am looking for hard drive options. Was thinking of installing a 320 gig 7200 drive in it but they are about the same price point as an external 1 TB 7200 3.5 drive. Is it possible to just run the mini off the external drive via firewire or USB2? Would that be slower than using the internal drive?
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Aug 12, 2007
Anyone have suggestions? I have a single 1.8ghz g5, 1gb ram, 10.4.10. I have a maxtor OneTouch III USB 2.0 200gb drive attached to it.
I can not seem to eject/unmount this drive. Every time i hook it up I just have to end up pulling the USB plug or turning the drive off suddenly to get it to "eject" but then i get the improper device removal error/warning message.
I have tried dragging to trash, I have tried apple E (which is what I usually do to any device) and I have tried going into disk utility and ejecting/unmounting from there as well. no dice.
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Dec 5, 2007
Anyone have suggestions? I have a single 1.8ghz g5, 1gb ram, 10.4.10. I have a maxtor OneTouch III USB 2.0 200gb drive attached to it.
I can not seem to eject/unmount this drive. Every time i hook it up I just have to end up pulling the USB plug or turning the drive off suddenly to get it to "eject" but then i get the improper device removal error/warning message.
I have tried dragging to trash, I have tried apple E (which is what I usually do to any device) and I have tried going into disk utility and ejecting/unmounting from there as well. no dice.
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Aug 25, 2010
I've been using a LaCie Quadra 2TB Hard drive for a little over a month now.
I've been noticing in that time that whenever I have the HD mounted my system seems to run slower in that it has lots of sporadic hang ups. I get the spinning beachball in all sorts of programs from Safari to Microsoft Word.
I am of course assuming the Hard drive is to blame, so I was wondering:
Can running an external hard drive (for use with Time Machine and general storage) slow a system down (in particular applications)?
The hard drive is a 7200rpm drive and its connected via firewire 800 if that is of any importance.
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Jun 19, 2010
After owning my Imac for about 12 months or more now I've noticed lately that it has become much much slower. I expected it to slow down just like all computers once you have used up a fair bit of memory space but I haven't used up much at all. I've tried to avoid using up too much space on my Mac by using an external storage drive but I'm wondering if that has the opposite effect? I've got the usual apps that help the Mac to run efficiently and I've followed various threads that show how to optimize the mac so I'm assuming there isn't all that much tweaking left to do... could be wrong though. A long time ago (i'm not sure what got into me) but I downloaded the apple developer software, I don't intend on using it but i don't what the correct names of the apps are and I don't want to uninstall the wrong stuff. I have tested the speed of my Mac with and without the external memory drive but didn't find much difference, but perhaps my tests weren't entirely accurate.
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Mar 8, 2008
Can I boot to an .iso on a firewire drive? I've been having trouble with my disc drive lately, so this is how I'm trying to work around it
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May 6, 2012
I have an external Lacie 1 TB hard disk which used to operate at USB2 speeds, but ever since I upgraded to my my Intel Mac Pro (from a G5) it only operates at USB1 speeds regardless of which USB port I plug it into. When I open up System Profiler, it reports "speed up to 12 Mb/sec" which of course is only USB1.1. It used to show "speed up to 480 Mb/sec". Do I need to reformat it something? Can I force it to connect at USB2 speeds?Â
Info:
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 2 x 2.66 Dual Core
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Nov 16, 2010
im looking for an external enclosure that provides a firewire option for my macbook pro. The reason i am doing this is because my macbook will randomly eject my usb powered one for no reason. I have been reading that firewire does not have this problem. Im only looking for an enclosure as I replaced my stock 320gb hardrive with a 64gb ssd for my main drive. Preferably something in the 30$ range because im a poor college student . Anybody know of a good enclosure to go with?
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May 21, 2010
I have a few macs running Tiger and Leopard and do not have a hard drive that is filled to more than 20GB of the capacity. Looking for external hard drive solutions. I have found a couple of very good drives that only have FW 400 and USB 2.0, one in particular is a older model G-Drive 500GB for $50 that is supposed to be quite reliable. These drives are being blown out due to newer ones have esata and fw 800. Would I see a difference in speed cloning or backing up to a a fw 400 drive even if I get a newer mac that only has fw 800 ports and I use a 400-800 adaptor? The better drives are faster 7200 RM vs the slower 5400 drives, mostly portable that I have been looking at. I have been reading posts that for applications such as mine I would not see a difference. For the most part I use the computers for office related tasks including Word, Excel etc with not much else, although I have some different utility programs. I just want a bootable drive should my hard drive fail. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my drives. My main comp has two drives where the primary is cloned to a secondary, but want a external that I can easily plug into a new mac and clone the hard drive in that Mac to my external drive!
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Apr 24, 2008
After one of the security updates to OSX 10.3 my OWC Neptune firewire external harddrive quit showing up on the desktop and I can't find a way to access it.
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Oct 19, 2010
I have a lacie firewire external hardrive. It's not showing on my mac when I plug in the firewire cable. When I put the usb cable in it shows right up. Now, when i connect the firewire cable to a friend's mac it shows right up.
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Mar 13, 2012
I am having a heck of a time trying to get either a brand new Lacie d2 Quadra OR a G-Tech G-Drive (both 2TB desktop models) to work on my iMac via the Firewire port. Mac is running 10.7.3, 2.8ghz Intel Core Duo. Â
Both drives are brand new out of the box. Â
When I connected them using Firewire they look like they mount, but they are unusable. They won't unmount if I try to reformat. Get error messages if I try to reformat, verify or disk repair. Messages say something about not being able to read some information. Keep in mind there's nothing on the drives. I have tried getting them to work with Time Machine with no luck. A few times it would backup for several hours only to give an error message and crash. Something is clearly wrong when I use Firewire. Â
But when I connect using USB? Voila! No problems at all. Repair, formatting, storage, etc. all work fine. Â
What the heck is it with Firewire? I am dealing with slow transfer speeds for now, but I'd really like to have them connected via Firewire and off my USB ports. Â
I have zapped the PRAM and permission module to no avail. Not sure what else can be done. Â
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Apr 30, 2012
Have late 2006 iMac 24'' and I can't boot from external FireWire drive. If I connect the same external drive via usb2 I can boot from it but it is slower than FireWire800 would be. The external drive is in i-tec 3.5 External Case.Â
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), iMac 24'' late 2006 intel DualCore2
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Jun 22, 2014
My external firewired hard drive is 250 GB. There is at this time approximately 189 GB remaining unused free space. How can i create a special partition of approximately 20 GB ? Can Disk Utility do that or do i require a commercial version ? And if Disk Utility can do that how is that done ?  Â
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Jun 6, 2009
I am looking for a SELF-Powered USB2.0/FW 400 external hard drive, does such a beautiful piece of hardware exist?
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Jul 5, 2012
I am having difficulties burning 88.x MB DMG files to CDs (new CD-Rs and an old CD-RW) onto two different external USB2 disc burner drives (both have power AC connected: HP and LG Super brands). The new Mac Mini (no disc slot drive)'s updated 64-bit Mac OS X 10.7.4's Disk Utilities tries to burn and then fail right away or after a few seconds. The error says "Unable to burn 'whatever.dmg' (The disc drive did not respond properly and can't recover or retry." Nothing interesting in dmesg, but Disk Utility's logs had details:[URL].Â
I do see my drives' lights on during the burn. I can quick erase the old CD-RW fine. I can burn 538 MB from an 64-bit Windows 8 on my Acer AM3800 PC with the same discs and external burner drives without any problems. Also, I thought it was my USB cable extension, but it wasn't it. I don't use any USB hubs either. DMG files are fine too. I did notice copying from a CD to Mac Mini's local HDD was slow, but no failures.Â
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Jul 5, 2012
I am having difficulties burning 88.x MB DMG files to CDs (new CD-Rs and an old CD-RW) onto two different external USB2 disc burner drives (both have power AC connected: HP and LG Super brands). The new Mac Mini (no disc slot drive)'s updated 64-bit Mac OS X 10.7.4's Disk Utilities tries to burn and then fail right away or after a few seconds. The error says "Unable to burn 'whatever.dmg' (The disc drive did not respond properly and can't recover or retry." Nothing interesting in dmesg, but Disk Utility's logs had details: url...I do see my drives' lights on during the burn. I can quick erase the old CD-RW fine. I can burn 538 MB from an 64-bit Windows 8 on my Acer AM3800 PC with the same discs and external burner drives without any problems. Also, I thought it was my USB cable extension, but it wasn't it. I don't use any USB hubs either. DMG files are fine too. I did notice copying from a CD to Mac Mini's local HDD was slow, but no failures.
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May 2, 2005
I recently purchased an external hard drive (firewire 400) and I want to move my home folder there. When I hold down the option key and click on the folder, it just copies my home folder to the hard drive. Is it possible to move my home folder to the hard drive? I'm using OSX 10.3.9.
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Mar 22, 2009
I am in need of an external hard drive for backups of my new 24" iMac due to arrive on Wednesday March 25. I am moving from the PC works (old Dell) and will need something larger than the old one I have for the long term. I have an old external hard drive case and a 250GB ATA hard drive inside I can use for the time being with the new Mac if I reformat it.
That said, I would like to get a drive that is at least equal to what is in the iMac with is 1 TB. I have read a lot of postings and believe I will get a Western Digital MyBook for Time Machine backups (unless someone has a better alternative). Is there any reason to get the Studio 1 or II (FW 800) over the Essential (USB 2.0) for my purposes - backups only? The price difference is $40-80 for equivalent drive space with connections being the difference.
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May 3, 2009
If I connect my Western Digital 500 GB external hard drive up to a computer using the USB port, then can I daisy chain a firewire camcorder to the hard drive and use it with the computer? Or is that impossible?
I hate the fact that the Macbooks don't have firewire, other then the white one. or the Pros.
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Jul 23, 2009
I just got a new hard drive for my Black macbook 2,1 and no i need a good external hard drive to put my old hard drive. Do you guys have any recommendations, I'd like to get something that has firewire and usb.
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Dec 1, 2009
I recently bought both a new MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard (10.6.2) and a 500 gb Western Digital firewire drive to back up my files. I copied a large amount of files to the external drive, but when I try to move those files into a different folder on the same drive to organize them, it tries to copy the files instead of just moving them. I can't figure out how to just move them into a new folder for consolidation without creating a duplicate file. Am I missing something basic here?
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Dec 16, 2009
im trying to install Mac OS X 10.5 on to an external drive. I want to run Leopard off of an External Hard Drive which will connect via Firewire of USB 2.0. I have booted up using the install DVD that i bought a couple years ago to upgrade from Tiger. However each time i install i get an error saying that it cannot be installed. It allows me to start the install and is almost complete before i get this error. I have it partitioned using the Apple Partition Map so i can boot up on a PowerPC computer.
What should i do to install 10.5 on an external drive?
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Jul 1, 2012
I have a Firewire 800 external hard drive and need to connect to my new MacBook Air. Where can I get the correct cable?
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Jun 10, 2012
MacBook Pro - Time Machine won't backup to firewire external drive?
Info:
MacBook Pro
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Nov 6, 2010
I have a 2010 macbook pro with snowleopard on it & have a 7 port ac powered usb hub hooked up to it. If I plug in 1 or more external hard drives into the hub & have them working together/transferring files, will there be a big slowdown?right now my hard drives are in just usb 2.0 enclosures. Would it be worth upgrading their enclosures to firew wire - esata? would I feel a performance difference?
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Dec 12, 2010
I am looking for a eSata expresscard for my MacBook Pro. I have a problem with looping my G Drive external through my firewire soundcard due to the single bus on the mbp. It just doesn't like it. What eSata expresscard adaptor would you recommend so i can hook my G Drive upto it?
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Oct 1, 2008
I'm looking for a way to connect an external bus-powered Firewire 800 hard drive (Glyph Portagig 800) to an iMac which only has Firewire 400 ports, and still powering the drive through just the Firewire connector.
All I've found are Firewire 400 to 800 adapters, allowing Firewire 400 peripherals to be connected to computers having only Firewire 800 ports. I need the opposite of course.
Where can I get such adapters, and without sacrificing bus-power?
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May 15, 2009
So here is my bright idea. I still may want to have Windows on my iMac for work projects *sigh* I think I came up with a solution, I rather not partition my iMac (when I buy it) 1TB drive for Windows. Don't want Windows on my main disk - I need the storage for Mac things, personal stuff etc. Is it possible to boot from a Firewire connected external HDD to run Windows?
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